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Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual
Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for
him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person
altogether; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign
to him a life of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not
easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed
state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of happiness;
it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the
integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of
mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and
to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his
gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.
He can care for no other Term than That: all else he will attend
to only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of
any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable
attention to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives
here or there.
He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and
possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not
prevented from abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at
nature's hour, he himself always the master to decide in its
regard.
Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's
satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Term's sake and
not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the
thing which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his
lyre, as long as it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he
will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having
another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let
it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an
instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him
in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time.
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